(gentle music) (upbeat music) Experimenting with music.

A persistent candle maker.

"TORUS is the most ambitious, drone-based severe weather and tornado research project ever."

"What If..." See these rolling down your street and you might want to keep an eye on the sky, because that's what they're doing!

These are part of a huge UNL-led research effort to better understand severe weather.

And we're gonna take you on a day-long trip with this project later in this episode of "What If...", our series on innovation and creativity in Nebraska.

But first - we experiment in science; why not music?

Stacey Barelos said it and does it.

(camera gear clicking) (Velcro snapping) (camera gear clicking) (metal sliding) (synchronized instruments playing) (bag falling) - I believe that, (bag falling) (synchronized instruments playing) (zipper opening) but I have a very wide view of what music is.

(synchronized instruments playing) And I like to just push that as far apart as I can.

(synchronized instruments playing) (clapperboard clapping) I suppose experimental music is anything that experiments.

(thumb piano playing) (metal clanking) And that might be experimenting with the harmonic traditions.

(piano playing) But experimental music can also be just using instruments, in non-traditional ways.

(piano playing) When I was, I think, nine, my mom forced me to take piano.

I threw a big fit, but she said I had to do it for a year.

And then I just kept with it.

(piano playing) But maybe, maybe it's because I got into modern music, that that was my way to get back at her.

I don't know.

(laughing) (piano playing intensifies and subsides) I mean, instantly it's thunderous.

Yeah, I mean, that's... (inside of piano playing) With these giant strings.

These super giant strings have such rich overtones.

(inside of piano playing) When you play on the keys, you're thinking very specifically about harmonies.

And maybe I like the inside of the piano because they don't have the same sorts of rules, about getting the correct theoretical ideas.

(inside of piano playing) It opens it up so many ways.

And I mean, you can hear how people are like, "Wow, what's that sound?"

"How are you doing that?"

"I want to try that."

Right?

(inside of piano playing) Is everybody ready to make some noise?

We're going to play music in your own homes.

I think we're going to make some accompaniments to some silent films.

We're also going to work on your instrument, obviously.

Soundry, is the education arm of the "Omaha Under the Radar Festival" and that happens every summer.

I'm gonna see what I have over here.

I'll be right back.

You guys can look around too.

Soundry is for adults and it's an experimental music workshop and we do a variety of things.

Okay, so, what I found for a longer sound, I have these wood bowls, I used for a piece and just playing the bowls against each other.

(bowls buzzing) We create instruments and we improvise.

- [Person On Video Call] I have a sugar container.

- I think the sugar container is great.

(metal clanking) Try to make as much scissor sound as you can.

Ready, go.

(scissors snapping) It's great to share these ideas with other people and then what they send back my way, is also amazing.

It is totally a blast.

It's definitely a labor of love.

- What are we doing today?

- We are making thumb pianos.

I think that a thumb piano is super fun.

Everyone can relate to how it works.

- The sort of, earthy sounds are great.

And thumb pianos are a part of many cultures around the world.

- So I've got some keys, a couple of screws.

[Stacey] You've got all kinds of things.

What you're going to have to do is get that underneath.

[Mike] Okay.

[Stacey] And this on top.

Yep.

And be able to see it through, plus this.

[Mike] Oh, good grief.

[Stacey] And then add the screws.

And fun fact, I harvested these from windshield wipers.

(electrical drill whirring) - So idea being, I want to kind of make sure I've got a variety of different... [Stacey] Different lengths yeah.

[Mike] Lengths, okay.

[Stacey] Power tools are the best part.

(electrical drill whirring) (thumb piano playing) [Mike] This is cool.

So, when you have somebody make something like this, - Mm-hmm.

- what do you kinda hope they're getting out of doing it?

- I hope that they are having fun making music, but also thinking more about the process of making an instrument.

- This was fun, thank you.

- Okay, yeah.

No problem.

(Mike chuckling) Good job.

(synchronized instruments playing) Well, I, you know, sometimes it's just breaking the same rules.

You know, there's lots of music in the past, that I think is great, that people don't know about.

And people have never heard the rules being broken.

So, just re-presenting that, gives a new generation of people to, to try.

To try new ideas.

(toy piano playing) You know, I saw someone play a toy piano maybe 10 years ago and I loved it.

(toy piano playing) Yeah, I've composed some for the toy piano.

And last year, I actually went to two toy piano conferences, international toy piano conferences- one in Italy and one in Korea.

(toy piano playing) But I think it just combines so many of my interests- Non-traditional sounds, non-traditional-making sounds.

(toy piano playing) (inside of piano playing) (toy piano playing) So, I think experimental music is full of possibilities.

(toy piano playing) I mean, it's what I love and I think it's what I do best.

So, you know, I am, I'm always trying to go out there and share new things to people, you know.

I don't feel like I'm the person to shine new light on Mozart, you know.

That's just not my shtick.

But sharing experimental music.

I feel passionate about it.

And if nothing else, even if people don't like it, I hope it makes them think about it.

You know, what music can be.

(toy piano playing) -Another part of our "What If..." project is called Innovator Insights - short web videos with creative, innovative Nebraskans answering questions for a next generation of innovators.

One common theme is persistence and learning from failure.

Many of the most important discoveries in the world have been from taking risks and failing.

I think that's true on an individual level, too.

It's really important to not be afraid to fail.

As long as you keep getting up and you keep trusting yourself that you need to move forward, every single risk is going to be worth it.

I have never regretted taking a risk.

Sarah Spitsen embodies the persistence that makes entrepreneurs tick.

- I am a person that likes to make up my own title and my own job and go after things that are crazy and fun.

(upbeat music) So during that time, I ran the retail storefront, quickly learned that I was not meant for the retail world and closed the store down after three years.

I was divorced, I had nowhere to live, I had no money, and luckily a lot of friends' couches were offered to me.

It's a more wholesale-friendly candle line and every single thing we do gives back.

So in order to grow Feya, since I had very little, I sold all my belongings, I hopped in my car, and I toured the country living out of my car.

I would sell candles along the way, and then give those meals back to the local homeless shelters before I'd leave town.

We're six years into Feya, and we've been able to give tens of thousands of meals, and we're working on providing an entire well system in Sub-Saharan Africa for an all-girls school later this year.

I started Feya out of inspiration from my Granny Fey and my Aunt Pamela that I lost.

They taught me how to cook and to care for people and to always rebound from hardships.

I'm Sarah, I'm the chief candle lady and food giver of Feya Candle Company.

There were plenty of days that things didn't work quite right during the month these were roaming the Midwest.

But when everything clicked, spending a day with the most ambitious drone-based investigation of severe weather and tornadoes ever was a lot of fun.

And we're gonna take you on the ride!

- Windsondes?

- LIDAR?

P3?

- P3's up.

- Okay.

- [Mike] Each morning starts like this, a hotel lobby full of brainpower, making a game plan for the day.

Here's upper-level water vapor imagery from across the CONUS.

As usual, there's a trough out west.

- [Mike] This project is officially Targeted Observation by Radars and Unmanned Aircraft Systems of Supercells.

Yeah, that's why they just call it TORUS.

- So, these storms might all end up being elevated north of that front, if that doesn't retreat northward, as the cams suggest.

- [Mike] It's severe weather research on steroids, with a manned aircraft, drones, mobile radar and LIDAR systems, two dozen total vehicles.

60 researchers, including students from a bunch of different universities, roaming 367,000 square miles of the Midwest for a month.

- I thought the winds were pretty veered.

- [Mike] A grant-funded multimillion-dollar effort led by the university of Nebraska-Lincoln and Adam Houston.

- The aim of the TORUS is to take high-resolution observations, collect high-resolution measurements of supercells and tornadic supercells in particular and see if we can, number one, improve the conceptual model of supercells and, number two, apply that conceptual model to improve forecasting.

- [Mike] In short, looking at small-scale things within big thunderstorms to better understand what makes tornadoes form from these supercells, unique because of the way they're coordinating lots of tools to look at storms from lots of angles.

- And obviously, there's a lotta potential targets and a lot of interesting evolution today.

- [Mike] Before what comes where.

[Adam] We're aiming for Salina.

We're gonna leave now.

- [Mike] Not before a few things get fixed.

- We are trying to troubleshoot our multi-hull probe sensor.

So, this probe will give us wind directions or, sorry, wind speed and direction.

And it also gives us some pressure, temperature, and relative humidity measurements.

- When you go down the road, it sounds like that inside, so you gotta tighten that.

(tools whirring) - [Mike] Work started long before the chase.

Months earlier, Houston and students built mobile mesonets.

Ford Explorers equipped to run computers and gather basic weather info like temperature, air pressure, and wind.

Scientists became auto mechanics.

I think it's fun to do that, fun to try to come up with a solution to do something that hasn't been done on a vehicle like this before.

- 'Cause you can't just go and buy a storm-chasing vehicle at your average auto lot, right?

[Adam] No, yeah.

Even if you said that you wanted to do this, there isn't a blueprint for mounting all this equipment on there.

[Mike] Houston grew up in Austin, Texas, interested in the work of his dad, a civil engineer involved in stormwater management and flood control.

[Adam] We had a computer in my parents' bedroom that had showed all the gauges and everything, and I'd always watch it.

And they would flash red when there was flooding and it was just thrilling.

I mean, thrilling from a computer geek standpoint, but, hey, whatever.

- [Mike] Now, it's the thrill of the chase.

They've had several days in a row of finding and deploying on storms.

That doesn't always happen.

Does this look like a positive day?

- Yeah, I mean, there's a fair amount of uncertainty.

I expect we're gonna see supercells, and whether or not they're targetable is kind of another matter.

- [Mike] This is a really crazy rolling circus, isn't it?

- [Adam] Yeah, it very much is.

("Bass Clarinet Concerto III" by Matthew Haakenson) - [Mike] So, just tell me what you're seeing over there.

- You got some cumulus going up along what's called a triple point, and that will hopefully be where we can get some more isolated cells that we can actually go after and deploy on.

- So, this is a good region for initiation and they would track kinda along this vector to our north.

So, if we do anything, presumably we'd head north.

- [Mike] But not just yet.

- [Justin, NET] How much of this gig is just hanging out, hurry up and wait?

- Honestly, like 85%.

- A lot of it.

A lot of it is hurry up and wait.

- Waiting, chilling.

- It's a tempo that a lotta people just aren't accustomed to.

And when you bring 'em out, they say, "Why did we just rush to this location?"

Well, a switch is flipped and you just go.

And then you may go to just get in position, but if you miss that timeframe, if you're outta that window just a little bit, then you could be out of position for - [Mike] They wait, watch, and fix stuff.

Tell me what you're doing.

- Fixing our GoPro mount.

- [Mike] What's this been like so far?

- It has been intense.

It's been a really active pattern so far, way more active than anything I've ever been out chasing for.

So, a lotta driving and a lot of nights without a whole lotta sleep.

- [Mike] We asked Alex Erwin and another UNL student, Jamie Foote, to keep video diaries for us, a different look at what it's like to do this for a month.

- It is deployment day two?

Yes.

And what town are we in?

- Garden City, Kansas.

- Amarillo, Texas.

- Lamar, Colorado.

- North Platte, Nebraska.

- Colby, Kansas.

- Norman, Oklahoma.

- Enid, Oklahoma, right now after a full day's deployment.

- We are getting ready to deploy on this storm.

- As we chug our Red Bull slushies and get our suntan on.

- This is my dance team, the TORUS dance team.

No, you're done.

♪ I went down, down, down ♪ ♪ And the flames went higher ♪ - Right now, we're at the laundromat.

We all ran outta clothes since we've been here for like a week now.

(laughing) (students cheering) - What?!

- We're in Tribune, Kansas, currently waiting to determine what our target is gonna be.

We have some towering cumulus off in the distance, so that's how it's going.

- We've been sitting in the parking lot of a hotel for three-and-a-half hours, I think.

We all got some nice tanning in.

It is a glorious day because we finally got (laughing) our Whataburger.

- We're going to be chasing the storm of the day.

(laughing) - Whataburger?

- Yeah.

- Whataburger?

That's what I've been saying.

Whataburger.

(laughing) We had a little bit of a bust yesterday, but we all got a lot of sun.

It was really nice.

You can see a victim right here putting aloe on.

(laughing) - A little too much sun .

(laughing) - [Jamie] We're heading back east today, so we'll see what we get ourselves into today.

(laughing) (whooshing) (drone buzzing) ("Revelation 7 Reprise" by Stephen Tefft) Yesterday, we had our very first deployment and we saw a tornadic supercell down around Farnam, Nebraska.

It went really well and it was really exciting, and it was my first tornado.

Yesterday was a really long day.

We didn't get to our hotel until like midnight.

- Been up since 6:00 a.m. Central Time.

It is currently 11:45 p.m. - I am just, feel so thankful and excited that I get to be a part of this project.

Cheers!

Woo!

-[Adam] A group of students got a really unique experience, and I'm thrilled that they were able to get that, I truly am, because I know that when I was a student, those kinds of experiences were really important for me.

(energetic dance music) There's a storm that's formed near Hays to our west-southwest.

Hopefully, it sticks together and comes out, and we'll be in position right here.

It's a long ways off.

A lotta stuff can happen between now and then, but... - [Mike] Because storms don't care if you want to research them.

Sometimes they don't form.

Sometimes they form and die quickly.

Sometimes they form, but become too dangerous to target.

Add that it's too dangerous to chase at night or in more populated areas, finding a good storm to target doesn't happen every day.

Figuring out where to be and when to get there is part science, part instinct, part luck, even for veterans like Houston.

- Yeah, sometimes those those decisions about, "Should we be this county or that county," could be the difference between being able to target a storm and not.

- [Mike] in one of the UNL mobile mesonets, Foote and Houston use a lot of different tools to find the right spot.

Their driver, UNL student Ethan Lang, adds his veteran storm-chaser perspective.

There's coordination and communication among all involved and a field coordinator making big-picture decisions, like which storm to target.

But individual missions like Houston's mesonet and the drone they're supporting decide the exact spot they wanna be on the left flank of the storm.

- [Jamie] You can see this gray line, that's the storm motion.

So, we have to try to get at the right angle that we can just right so we can intersect into this storm.

There's where we are right now.

And the storm is out right here.

So, it's gonna just kind of come right over us and we'll just intercept it right when it's going over that area.

- [Man On Radio] Copy that.

Yeah, we'll see where this thing tracks.

- I feel like I need to be keeping track of when you say it's gonna be a good day and when it's gonna be a bad day and see how our deployments go.

(Adam laughing) - Once we get to Beloit, we'll stop there and get into our teams.

("Lula" by William Danze) ♪ La-la ♪ ♪ La-la ♪ ♪ La-la ♪ ♪ La-la-la ♪ ♪ La-la ♪ ♪ La-la ♪ ♪ La-la ♪ ♪ La-la-la ♪ - We've got about an hour left until the coffee wears off.

(laughing) We're not gonna launch until, for probably another 30 minutes.

But I wanna get west, and then there's that good, well, 24 just runs straight up, so it's a perfect road.

We'll just wait 'til it comes up.

Duck and dive around Beloit, just need to be mindful of it.

- [Man On Radio] Okay, yep, I'll look at the map.

- Just not seeing it.

("I Variations" by Mathew Fuerst) How's it going?

I'm with that scout up there.

- Okay, all right.

- Thanks.

(phone alert toning) - Kansas, you're dangerous today.

- Ooh!

- Oh, (bleep).

- Do you see that, Jamie?

- Mm-hmm.

- Holy crap.

Yeah, it's far off, but it's a very wide tornado.

And tracker, if the aircraft experiences any rapid rising motion or sinking motion, - [Speaker On Radio] Copy that.

- I think that's fine.

- Check the onboard GPS.

It uses its power cycle at some point.

How many satellites do you have, Steve?

- 11.

- Sweet.

- Still no VectorNav GPS, but everything else is coming through.

- Launching in three, two, one.

(whooshing) (drone buzzing) (whooshing) (drone buzzing) - We're not nomadic, unlike a lotta our other flight crews, where they kind of follow the storm around.

We just stay in one spot, go up and down a few times, land, and then move to a different spot.

- But what I'm ultimately able to do with this is kind of get an idea of how the storm is progressing and moving forward.

So, if I see that suddenly they're getting a giant wind change where it's coming outta the east, I can warn the team, "Hey, look, "you're gonna be experiencing some pretty severe winds.

"Expect an eastern track on the storm."

(drone buzzing) - [Mike] With drones, the manned aircraft above, and all the other resources on the ground, it's a good deployment for TORUS.

Right place, right time, right storm.

Is that pretty good size?

- That was a pretty large tornado.

- [Mike] An EF-2 with peak winds of 118 miles an hour.

It damaged bins, sheds, trees, but didn't hurt anyone.

- The takeaway message is it was a pretty large tornado and we're getting a good data set on it.

(drone scrapes dirt) - [Student] You're down.

("Background Music by Eshaan Giri") - So, we have three options.

We can just go get dinner.

We can chase this storm.

We can go to Lincoln.

- Option number two.

- So, this storm's already crossing the highway, so we would have to-- - Core punch!

- [All] Core punch, core punch, core punch!

- We have hail guards, let's test 'em!

- So, tell me about today.

Good day, average day?

- I think today was a good day.

It was pretty low stress.

Sometimes it kind of gets a little hairy with trying to find road networks and making sure we're ahead of the storm, but I thought we made good headway and had good progress and we made sure to stay ahead of the storm, so that way we could be in good position.

- We were able to target a good storm and it ended up producing a tornado.

We got a good transect, it just turned out that the outflow from another storm undercut it, and so it just didn't last very long.

The storm didn't last very long.

- [Mike] Short term, but-- - Yeah, yeah.

I mean, a short deployment, short but good deployment.

- [Mike] This was one of 14 deployment days during the month of TORUS.

Seven tornadic supercells, 40 hours of drone flights, 9,000 miles of driving, 25 nights in hotels.

Are you exhausted at the end of a month of this?

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

Just, yeah, exhausted.

It's okay.

Give me another few days and I'll be ready to go back out.

(laughing) - [Mike] Gathering info available for all scientists interested in improving our understanding of severe weather.

Who benefits from all this?

- Well, I want to believe that the general public benefits.

And I say, "I want to believe," 'cause until we actually analyze the data, see what we got, see what secrets are revealed, we won't know for sure.

But a case can be made that as we improve understanding, we improve forecasting.

And we improve forecasting, we save lives.

The other beneficiaries are the students.

The students have gained an experience that is unparalleled.

- I think the part that really interests me the most is the human impact.

I think about, we're driving through a town and there's tornado sirens going and I'm thinking, "This whole town could be in a panic right now."

And it's just, I wanna be able to help people and figure out, try to help them realize what's actually going on and just better inform people about what's coming for them.

- We'll lead.

Okay.

- Yeah!

- If you get into hail-- ("Wandering Star" by Daniel Christian) Check out all of our stories online, or #WhatIfNebraska on social media.

Thanks for going along for our latest trip down the road of innovation and creativity!

("Gear" by Emily and the What If...

Band) Captions by Foreman/NET ("Gear" by Emily and the What If...

Band) Copyright 2021 NET Foundation for Television